Fate Knocks at the Door eBook

That was a frequent saying of the Captain’s
about the States. Twice a year at least, he was
accustomed to make the voyage to New York....
The truth was, the old man felt a yearning for something
the years and India had given Bedient. He felt
much more than he said, and often regarded the young
man, as one rapt in meditation.... His interest
in Gobind and the Himalayas was insatiable; much more
eagerly did he listen regarding the Punjab than about
the ports he had known so well—­and the
changes that had passed under the eyes of the young
man in Manila and Japan.... When Bedient was
relating certain events of days and nights, that had
become happy memories through the little things of
the soul, Captain Carreras would start to convey the
indefinite desires he felt; then suddenly, the deep
intimacy of his revelations would appear to his timid
nature, and even in the mothering dark, the panic
would strike home—­and he would swing off
with pitiful humor about goats or some other Island
affair....

Bedient had an odd way of associating men whom he
liked with mothers of his own imagining. Happily
discovering fine qualities in a man, he would conjure
up a mother to fit them.... Often, he saw the
little Englishwoman whose boy had taken early to the
seas.... She was plump and placid in her cap;
inclined to think a great deal for herself, but still
she allowed herself to be kept in order mentally and
spiritually by her husband, whose orthodoxy was a
whip. Perhaps she died thinking her tremulous
little departures were sure attractions of hell and
heresy. Bedient liked to think of her as vastly
bigger than her mate, bigger than she dreamed—­but
alone and afraid.

SEVENTH CHAPTER

ANDANTE CON MOTO—­FIFTH

For the first time in his life, Bedient learned what
America liked to read.... All the finer expressions
of the human mind and hand gave him deep joy.
His love and divination for the good and the true were
the same that characterized the rarest minds of our
ancestors, who had access only to a few noble books
in their formative years. And Bedient’s
was the expanded and fortified intelligence of one
who has grown up with the Bible.

Each ship brought the latest papers, periodicals and
certain pickings from the publishers’ lists.
India had not prepared Bedient for this. With
glad welcome he discovered David Cairns here and there
among short-story contributors, but the love of man
and woman which the stories in general exploited,
struck him of Indian ideals as shifty and pestilential.
The woman of fiction was equipped with everything to
make her as common as man. She was glib, pert,
mundane, her mind a chatter-mill; a creature of fur,
paint, hair, and absurdly young. The clink of
coins was her most favorable accompaniment; and her
giving of self was a sort of disrobing formality.
The men who pursued her were forward and solicitous.
There was something of sacrilege about it all.
The minds and souls of real women—­such were
not matters for American story; and yet the Americans
wrote with dangerous facility. Bedient, who worshipped
the abstraction, Womanhood, felt his intelligence
seared, calcined.... Only here and there was a
bit of real literature—­usually by a woman.
The men seemed hung up to dry at twenty-five.
There was no manhood of mind.